JOURNEY INTO SPACE
By Toby Litt
FT
February 28 2009 00:49
It’s always a slightly unnerving proposition when a mainstream
literary author takes an unexpected sidestep into science fiction,
having shown no previous tendencies in that direction.
First, there’s the fear that he or she will deny the work is in
any way science fictional, as though SF is somehow tainted and, by
association, tainting. In the past this has given us the unedifying
spectacle of Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, to name but two,
putting themselves through contortions in their efforts to disavow
the SF aspects of novels – respectively The Handmaid’s Tale and The
Stone Gods – that are plainly, full-bloodedly SF. Why choose to employ
the tools and tropes of the genre if you’re only going to flap your
hands afterwards and claim you didn’t?
There’s also the danger that the author doesn’t fully understand SF
– where it comes from, how it works, what it’s for. Then he or she
will make a half-hearted stab at it, as if idly scratching an itch
(Philip Roth’s counterfactual The Plot Against America), or botch it
altogether (Paul Theroux’s turgid satire on consumerism, O-Zone),
or, perhaps worst of all, hit upon some concept that to him or her
seems n ew and revolutionary but to even the most casual SF reader is
old hat – a case, one might say, of reinventing the warp drive. For
instance, critics in the literary pages lionised Martin Amis for the
time-in-reverse conceit of Time’s Arrow, while SF greybeards sighed
and pointed out that, as is so often the case, Philip K. Dick did it
first (in Counter-Clock World) and did it better.
Toby Litt has shown himself to be unafraid of varying form and
tone. Every novel he writes is different from the last one. Compare
the boy-thug viewpoint of Deadkidsongs (2001) to the postmodern,
Virginia Woolf-esque inflections of Finding Myself (2003). Perhaps the
only unifying thread running through his oeuvre are the titles which,
in published order, begin with subsequent letters of the alphabet.
Given such a diverse array, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Litt’s
10th novel is nothing like any of the previous nine. Journey Into
Space (we’re up to J) is also wholeheartedly and unashamedly a work
of science fiction.
The title is at once a tribute to the pulp magazines that were the
genre’s cradle – imagine it in a dramatic, up-sweeping font, perhaps
suffixed with an exclamation mark – and an accurate if somewhat
prosaic summation of the plot. This is a book about a journey into,
and ultimately back from, space. It’s that straightforward. But within
the edifice of a scen ario that has been done a million times before,
Litt finds new and interesting places to explore.
UNSS Armenia has been travelling outward from earth for decades. This
kilometre-long starship can move nearly at the speed of light but
is built, ironically, in the shape of a slug. Its destination is a
habitable world which, when they reach it decades hence, the crew
will colonise. Since cryogenic suspension has not been perfected,
generations are born aboard the Armenia who will not live to see the
ship’s destination.
The story opens by focusing on teenage cousins Celeste and August,
who pine for an earth they have never known and who are finding it
hard to come to terms with the fact that they will spend their entire
lifespans as passengers in space. As an antidote to claustrophobia and
ennui, they conjure up descriptions of natural landscapes familiar
to them only through literature and art, gradually distilling these
into an imaginary paradise, which happens to be an idealised version
of the Lake District.
Their collusion in this shared fantasy is a seditious act in the ship’s
rigidly controlled environment, where everything is monitored and
broadcast by means of the all-pervasive onboard computer system known
only as "it" – a play on the acronym for information technology. And
when collusion becomes physical consummation, and a child is conceived,
the way is paved for a collapse20of moral purpose and a breakdown
of order.
The fruit of Celeste and August’s union, Orphan, is a drooling
congenital idiot whose simple, hedonistic outlook is rapidly
elevated to an ideology, and himself to captain of the ship, and then
king. Sexual restraint is superseded by orgiastic free-for-all. A
sense of mission is discarded in favour of the missionary position
(and, indeed, emissions).
During this same period, earth itself convulses in a spasm of
inter-religious war and civilisation is annihilated. This leaves
the crew of the Armenia a deracinated race, isolated, pathologically
depressed.
Eventually, naturally, a new order of discipline and asceticism
emerges. The next generation of the crew forms a nihilistic cargo cult
that views the ravaged, polluted homeworld as an object of shame and
scorn. The outcome is as inevitable as it is apocalyptic.
Journey Into Space’s basic premise, of lunacy and decay occurring
during an interminable flight through space, has a direct antecedent in
Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop. Litt, though, is to be commended for playing
the whole thing absolutely straight and for using science fiction for
what it does best: the examination of politics and society through
futuristic and/or otherworldly metaphor. Not only that but he handles
well the sense of sheer scale – spatial, temporal – in which SF exults
and excels.
Sometimes his questing, inventive use of languag e strives for heights
that it does not achieve, going from artful to arch.
What, one wonders, is "an almost-sobbing form of sleep"? What advantage
is there in describing something as "different-differing"?
Which is it, different or differing?
Nevertheless, Journey Into Space is a rich, bold foray into the unknown
from which this author comes back triumphant, his literary reputation
intact and his SF credentials, if he wants them, securely established.
James Lovegrove is the author of ‘Days’ and ‘Provender Gleed’
(Gollancz). ‘The Age Of Ra’ (Solaris) is out in July